Dead Letters(16)

Wyatt loved you. Since tenth grade, at least. I think he started doodling your combined names in his notebooks around then, embarking on his wholesome fantasy of your blissed-out heterosexual future. Ava Antipova no longer, now Ava Darling. Literally. Wyatt’s last name has always been too good to be true; first name, too, for that matter. I know he lusted after your pristine purity, your clean button-downs and tailored jeans, your fitted-waist striped gowns that are crying out (still) for a clambake in Cape Cod. That’s the sort of thing they do in Cape Cod, right? I’ve never been, as you know; I only have the apocryphal tidbits you regaled me with after the vacation you took with that unbelievably white girl after sophomore year, to the beaches that spawned our mother. Wyatt always admired your clean, restrained prettiness, how your hair was always tidy, how you always wear that delicate smirk on your face, like you’re busy cleverly narrating everything. All the things other people find infuriating about you, Wyatt loved. But you can keep a man at arm’s length for only so long, Ava dear, before you run the risk of him straying. Sounds like something Grandma Opal would say, right?

Let me sketch out a narrative for you, since I know how you love them, crave them, cook them up. I’m the one with a useless (half) degree in The Arts, but you, with your practical, analytical brain, always need to know how we got where we are. So how does this sound?

Boy and Girl go to the same hick high school. Boy is tall and strapping, bright for these parts. Not much money, but from a sweet, wholesome family who all LOVE EACH OTHER. Girl is pretty, smart as a whip, and desperate to erase her own family’s insanity, to transition to more sedate familial pastures. Boy is fairly smitten with Girl; strangely, Boy can sense the intense vulnerability that lurks behind all that careful togetherness. He sees the fragile underself that Girl tries desperately to mask with her control. Girl clearly likes Boy, BUT: Girl has gigantic stick up her ass, and Girl (due to a number of actually very reasonable justifications resulting from a traumatic upbringing with an emotionally withholding psychopath—I mean Mom, not me or Dad, ha ha) is unable to tolerate any sort of emotional vulnerability at all. So, she keeps Boy close for years, permitting certain liberties, ahem, but maintaining a strict emotional distance. A psychological moat. She strings Boy along in this infuriating fashion for some time. Years, like, seven of them. Boy is a good sport, but Boy is a boy, and Boy eventually weakens when Girl disappears for a few months without alerting anyone where she has gone. Girl is generally presumed to have absconded with Another Man.

Which is when Boy, primed by years of loving someone who is unable to love, turns to Other Girl, who happens to resemble Girl quite a bit. They could almost be copies of each other. Boy sees in Other Girl some of the same vulnerability, mirrored in Other Girl through a startling level of recklessness and disregard. Boy starts drinking a bit more than usual (he is finally over twenty-one now, after all, legally allowed to indulge) and spends time with Other Girl. Other Girl knows this is dangerous, but Other Girl is also lonely, and feels abandoned and slightly pissed off and/or vengeful. She knows Girl will come home eventually, but in the meantime, out of lonely desperation, she entertains a fantasy that Boy likes her for herself, and that she, Other Girl, might have an actual CONNECTION WITH A PERSON, a person who is not her identical twin. In short, she kids herself. Tells herself lies. Cooks up a story of her own.

Boy pines for Girl, as he has since the tenth grade, and then, one night, there is wine and equinoctial skinny-dipping and human nature, and Boy and Other Girl find themselves in an…uncomfortable situation. They can’t take it back, though, and both are beginning to doubt that Girl cares for either of them one whit. It has been a long, sexually tense winter of uncertainty. So Boy spends the rest of the spring in Other Girl’s trailer. And Girl finds this out in the worst way possible when she returns home unannounced. A confrontation occurs, and shit goes even more horribly wrong, if that’s possible, and a few things happen that might be considered irreversible, but which are really just the result of a lot of pent-up libidinous energy and the immoderation of youth. Everyone regrets what happened immediately, deeply, but Girl wigs out (rather disproportionately, in Other Girl’s humble opinion). Girl then impulsively storms off to Paris to get a PhD, something she was only vaguely threatening to do before the whole fiasco, and she skips town in a huff, without a word to Boy or to Other Girl, with whom she shares, like, one hundred percent of her DNA. Wanting to preserve the air of tortured mystery, like all wounded young people.

That sound right, Ava? I’m not trying to deflect blame or imply that you forced us into it. I’m pretty sure I could make that case, but I know that would infuriate you, so I won’t bother. You loved him, in your way, but your way was so damned cold. You let him pretend, played along just enough, but you never thought it was real. I remember how you used to talk about him, how undecided you were: “He’s sweet, and just right in so many ways, but sometimes I look at him and think I wouldn’t mind if he disappeared forever.” Remember saying that? You said he was paper-thin, and you projected a story onto him, to make the whole thing palatable. It was a game for you. Once, cruelly, you said: “If he had been born to different parents, he would probably be a Republican.” Absolute condemnation.

So you twiddled your thumbs and kept yourself at arm’s length and just waited for something to happen so you could throw up your hands and say, “Ha! I knew it was doomed, I knew I was right to emotionally protect myself! Shove off, you cad!” Just like our fucking mother, who loved Marlon more than anything but literally drove him off the farm because she was so certain everything would eventually go to shit anyway. Maybe I’m finessing that narrative a little; another email and we’ll do the whole Nadine and Marlon saga. It is useful for our purposes here merely to point out that you were doing the only thing that made sense to you, as a product of that particular shitshow, and I see why you did what you did. But I thought I was maybe helping you (stop scoffing). I thought if you were forced to acknowledge how upset you were that Wyatt was with someone else, you would maybe have to acknowledge Wyatt himself. To acknowledge that whatever was between you wasn’t paper-thin, not anymore, that you’d played along with the game too long and now it meant something. I wanted that for him too. I may not harbor the same repressed sexual longing for him that you have all these years, but I grew up with the boy, too, and he was around quite a bit. I care for the kid, and I really wanted him to stop moping, to either go for it (you) or move on. Not that I’m claiming altruism. I would never. Not ever. And then That Night happened and everything was moot after that, wasn’t it.